Dolor Comedenti

I remember the day I realized that I do believe in God. It was the same day that I realized that I hated Him. December 24, 2018.

If that has you railing against me, I assure you that it gets better.

As I said, it was December 24, 2018. I was sitting in church with my new family, attending a sermon about the birth of Jesus. This is something that they have done every year, and since we’d just gotten married, it’s now something we do every year. I was watching this thing and I could feel my anger building. I cannot remember what I was thinking or what was happening onstage, but I was boiling. I’d lost two people earlier that year to overdose and my step-dad had cancer–all three were amazing people, so I was saturated with grief. I found myself barely able to restrain my tears. I told myself that I could not cry at this function and ruin everyone’s night. As the title of this page implies, I often take on the pain of others and do everything I can to not burden others with mine. In the whirlwind of my rage and pain, I was bludgeoned by my hatred. Hatred for the person that was doing this to me, that was inflicting this pain on me. Which left me with the stunned realization that I could not hate what doesn’t exist. Seems like a simple enough idea to not be a stunning revelation, except it was something I had said to others before regarding the same thing, in past times, when I had been more sure of the existence of God.

I had already been depressed for a few months, despite being on anti-depressants. The deaths and my father’s cancer had their parts in the depression, and now, I had a new thing to heap on there. The God that I believed in wanted me to suffer. If he didn’t want me to suffer, he sure didn’t care enough to have made things differently.

I believed we were made to suffer. I began to believe that God was a sadist of some sort. It seemed the purpose of life was to form attachments only to lose them when they die: endless suffering. I decided I would form no more attachments but also realized I could not avoid some that I already had, such as my family, my kids, my husband. I was drowning in thoughts of what it would feel like to lose those people. I fell asleep each night with those thoughts. I could not comprehend any person’s faith in and love for this Higher Power that created us to suffer so deeply. I could not see the joy of connection, only the fear of pain.

This idea that God set the world up in a way that caused suffering has not left me entirely but I’ve ceased focusing on it. I can’t say for certain when I stopped. I know that it started fading when I picked up a book. I started reading. Then I started reading obsessively. In 2021, I read around 160 novels. Most 500+ pages. Somewhere along the way, the depression lifted. I was able to stop the anti-depressants. I don’t think about death and loss. I also don’t think about hating God or wonder why. I can see the joy of connection but I also am still hesitant to connect too fully. My stepfather did die and I did go through more loss in 2019..

I had to realize I hated God to realize I believed in a God. There could be a hundred reasons I needed to learn to discriminate in my connection. It’s been painful. I still have minimal faith in any kind of Higher Power. Life is progress, though, and I’m making it.